Page 47 of This Blood That Breaks Us

She didn’t deserve the stress. All I’d ever wanted to do was to make her life easier. She deserved better sons. Sons who didn’t keep secrets and make her cry. I’d only hoped she was happier without me.

“So, are you going to throw something in?” Connell looked at me expectedly. Thane wasn’t paying attention to us anymore, and instead, he carefully scanned the area.

I thought for a minute, knowing only one item of silver I possessed. I carried it in my pocket for good luck, and even in the scramble to get to Ireland, I’d held on to it.

“No.”Not today, anyway.

Connell escorted us through the town, and we greeted the shop owners. Most had lived there for their entire lives. Generations upon generations settled there in the shadow of the castle.

“Anything else you want to know?” Connell practically skipped next me.

“Not really. Unless you know any secret passageways or tunnels.”

“Oh, not here. But there are some when you take the ferry over to Ironsburg. The whole town is full of them. They made themduring one of the old wars, I think. I don’t know as much about the mainland as I do here.”

I hid my internal excitement at the news. Our plan was slowly coming together. If we could get Will and Thane out through the harbor, we might be able to hide them in the tunnels and find a way out.

A scuffle down the street caught my attention. Yelling, along with the sound of furniture and glass breaking resonated around us. We followed the sound to a pub, but it didn’t look like a bar fight. Henderson was outside with two others, taking a chair to the windows and breaking the glass. Inside, they were beating a man. I smelled the blood.

I was there in an instant, pulling them off him and holding the man up by his shoulders. He couldn’t have been younger than late forties.

“He didn’t report his earnings for the third week in a row and blatantly shows disrespect.”

“Connell, call a doctor for this man.”

“Uh, yeah. Sure.” Connell disappeared.

“What are you doing?” Henderson said.

“What areyoudoing?” I stood in his face. “I didn’t instruct you to take action of any kind.”

“You gave shit orders.”

“Then let me be clear. Do not touch them. You don’t think without my permission. Got it?”

The one next to him spoke, “Respectfully, sir, you don’t understand how things work here.”

“I do understand. You all listen and do whatever you’re instructed to do. This is me instructing you to do exactly as I tell you to. Do you understand me?”

I towered over them, with a familiar fire brewing in my chest. It had been so dim I forgot it existed.

“Yes, sir,” they said.

“Good. Now you’re going to clean this place up. And I mean every last shard of glass. I want to see you lick the floor to show me it’s clean.”

A woman tended to the wound on the man’s head, and it didn’t look deep.

He spoke slowly, “T-thank you.”

“I’m sorry about your store. We’ll pay to repair your windows. When you’re feeling better, we can work out whatever the problem is. I promise.”

I wondered if he could even understand me, but he held out a bloody palm for me to shake.

“Good . . . good man.”

As we left the pub, Thane whispered, “Can you really do that?”

“I don’t know.”